


A Twig Snaps

by InTheArmsofaThief



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magic!Stiles, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Polish Stiles Stilinski, Post Season 4, Stilinski Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 00:45:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4983313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InTheArmsofaThief/pseuds/InTheArmsofaThief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles remembered a bedtime story, which for a child, was just a story.  His mother would tell it to him every time he complained about his name and the way no one could pronounce it at school.  Or that he could barely pronounce it himself.</p><p>It was long, and clunky, and carried the weight of the world.  It wasn’t even a real name.</p><p>He remembered it had something to do with a man in the woods and Baba Jaga.</p><p>“Because,” his mother would say, “you are the child of Baba Jaga’s magic and you must never forget that.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Twig Snaps

**Author's Note:**

> This was technically a fic prompt where someone asked for magic!stiles and have it be a part of his heritage, but it's also something I've been thinking about a lot, so I put it under here instead of baneofawolf. idk, they're kind of arbitrarily separated.

Stiles sat in the empty loft, alone.  It was more than empty.  It was deserted.  Derek had up and disappeared before, but something told Stiles that this was the last time.  Derek had said goodbye instead of leaving them without warning, so they knew he wasn’t kidnapped.  That was nice, Stiles supposed.  If it weren’t for the fact that Beacon Hills felt utterly wrong now. 

The other times Derek left, it felt like a tether still anchored the wolf to the town.  He could drift, like a buoy on the tide, but he never strayed far, never for long.  Even before they had ever met, Stiles knew there was something more to the town, at least in retrospect.  There was always the presence of the Hale pack, even when they were wounded and scattered.  This time, though, that tether had snapped, finally frayed through.

Stiles hoped it was a good thing.  For Derek, at least. This town was too dark for some souls to handle.

X

When Scott first got bit, Stiles immediately thought _werewolf._   At first, the idea was a joke.  A wolf bite, supposed heightened senses, logical conclusion is to mess with his best friend.  But after he said the words out loud something settled in his stomach, like the sudden memory of his mother’s favorite hard candy on his tongue: bitter yet creamy.  Then they ran into Derek Hale and the feeling bubbled.  Stiles thought of his science fair experiment in fourth grade. 

None of this seemed off, for Stiles.  His mind often made weird jumps, tying thoughts and feelings and images together seemingly at random.  They made sense to him, in his own mind.  Point is, the sudden jolt to his skin, the sudden static fritzing at the back of his mind, the bitter creamy taste that left a weight in his stomach, none of it seemed odd to him, even if they themselves were out of the blue and rather unique for the circumstances.

But when Stiles got home the joke Stiles had made gnawed at the back of his mind and he researched.  And somehow, somehow, despite all logic to the contrary, the idea of werewolves didn’t seem quite so farfetched.

It wasn’t until months later, standing around Deaton’s metal examination table that an inkling of reasoning came to him.  Stiles, somehow, recognized the medallion Deaton used to represent the kanima.  It wasn’t something he had come across in his recent studies of the supernatural.  Somehow, somewhere, Stiles had learned about Cernunnos before. 

The thought itched at the back of his head but he couldn’t do anything about it.  More pressing matters.

It wasn’t until he was running out of mountain ash and he had to do _something_ and he saw that stupid ass quote about imagination that Stiles closed his eyes and thought of his mother.  He thought of her sly smile, her promises that his life would be something of legend, of her candles she kept in her trunk and the way she looked at his father whenever the sheriff, then deputy, sighed too heavily. 

And something sparked inside his chest, just behind his breast bone, reminding Stiles of the stillness of a stag under the light of the moon having just heard a twig snap in the distance.

Then the mountain ash circle was complete.  And Stiles knew.  He remembered where he learned about Cernunnos, and why it never seemed implausible for werewolves to be a reality, even when he himself was trying to pass it off as a joke.

Even amongst all the backstabbing and lies and lacrosse games and threats on his life and that of his friends, Stiles found time to sneak into his dad’s room.  His mother’s trunk was still at the foot of the bed, the afghan Babcia knitted still draped over it, dad’s latest ‘take home’ case files still sitting on top of it.  He carefully moved the casefiles, much like he did when he wanted to snoop as a kid, memorizing without much effort how they were stacked.  His dad never left anything _that_ important just lying around, but it was still stuff he wasn’t supposed to be looking at.  This time though, Stiles just moved it to the ground, pulled off the faded blue and brown and yellow afghan, and ran his hands over the cracked leather of his mother’s trunk.

The latch was gold in color, although he was sure it was some cheaper metal alloy.  It opened easily, no lock.  Stiles sorted through a top layer of scrapbooks and Stiles’s old baby blanket before he got to the stuff he only vaguely remembered from his childhood.  Her candles.  Her tarot deck.  Trinkets and pressed flowers.  There were letters from Babcia in messy Polish scrawl that Stiles didn’t bother to look over.  He took the tarot deck and started flipping through the cards.  His skin prickled in a way reminiscent of how it had when laying the mountain ash or meeting Derek for the first time.  Then he found it.  IX. The Hermit.  His mother’s deck was yellowed and hand drawn.  Here was a man, cross legged, with antlers.  Cernunnos.  The Horned God, the Hunter.  It was a Celtic deity, and they weren’t anything but Polish, so Stiles wondered why the mixing, until he remembered what he knew now.  Some of these things weren’t just myths. 

His mom had played with the cards.  She had taught him games like solitaire he remembered even now, not having even seen a deck in over 8 years.  And then Stiles remembered a bedtime story, which for a child, was just a story.  His mother would tell it to him every time he complained about his name and the way no one could pronounce it at school.  Or that he could barely pronounce it himself.

It was long, and clunky, and carried the weight of the world.  It wasn’t even a real name.

He remembered it had something to do with a man in the woods and Baba Jaga.

“Because,” his mother would say, “you are the child of Baba Jaga’s magic and you must never forget that.”

Stiles repacked his mother’s trunk, taking the tarot cards with him.  Something unsettling curled inside him.  This was some time ago.  Stiles remembered more, now. 

X

“Are you okay?”  Stiles looked up from the chaos around him.  Jackson was naked.  Lydia was crying.  Gerard was convulsing in a pile of black goo.  Allison was shell shocked.  Everyone was sad.  Stiles’s cheek hurt.  Derek looked down at him in worry, that one inch of height difference feeling like a mountain.

“Are you?” Stiles asked.  Derek had just been paralyzed, used again.  Stiles couldn’t imagine. (He would later hate this memory, because he would later be able to image all too easily.)

There was nothing more to this moment.  Stiles got back in his car.  He drove Lydia and Jackson home.  Scott was mid argument with Derek that Stiles didn’t want to stick around for.  He didn’t know how to tell his best friend he wasn’t on his side for this one. 

Still, somehow, that moment stuck with him.

Are you okay?  Stiles couldn’t pay attention to anything because his cheek still smarted, the rest of his body bruised but familiar.  And how sad was that, that his body near breaking point felt familiar? 

Neither of them had answered the question because both of them knew the answer: no.  It wasn’t the first time Stiles felt connected to Derek Hale, but it was the first time he recognized it.

X

That summer, after finishing school and finals and taking time to heal his body, Stiles went back to Deaton.  He asked for books on Baba Jaga. 

“I don’t really have much about Slavic lore.  The Druids were Celtic, which carried weight mostly in the British Isles and Gaul.”

“But?” Stiles prompted.

“There is some cross over.  Is this about your spark?”

Stiles startled.   

“Stilinski is a very Polish name,” Deaton surmised.  “It would make sense for you to be searching for your own heritage.”

“It’s from my mom’s side,” Stiles said.  Deaton raised an eyebrow at Stiles’s certainty.  “She used to tell me stories, as a kid.  Some of them don’t seem so childish, now.”

Deaton nodded in understanding and gave Stiles a few books, one about the druids and another about the Slavic witches.  Despite Deaton’s claims it looked as if he had a pretty worldly selection. 

“Always helps to be prepared.  Creatures emigrate with the populace.” 

Stiles agreed and was on his way. 

X

Stiles was finally forced to stop sneaking into the loft.  From out of town (or state, or even country, Stiles couldn’t be sure) Derek was throwing money at the building, having it renovated, turned into proper apartments and cleaning up the area.  The contractors were crawling the place like bugs and Stiles had to give up sitting in the last place Derek Hale called home in Beacon Hills.

He found himself at the old Hale property.  The land had been cleared over a year ago now.  It technically belonged to the police.  His dad had told him it was supposed to go up for public auction to help fund the station but that it kept “slipping his mind” each time one of them happens and he never gets around to signing off on it. 

There’s something to be said about cursed land.  Stiles believed in it.  Now, at least, he did. 

What was once the Hale House was now a clearing where grass was only just now beginning to fully cover the upturned earth of where the basement had been filled in with dirt. 

Stiles came back the next day with a sapling from Home Depot and planted it in the middle of the giant clearing.  It was a Cedar.  Stiles thought it was appropriate.  The land needed healing.

X

Stiles didn’t tell anybody about his research.  It didn’t mean anything.  Not yet, at least.  Besides, there was nothing helpful that he could do that wasn’t the trick with the mountain ash.  There was no reason to bring it up at all while his friends were dying.  First Erica, then Boyd.  Then himself, he thought bitterly.  The time the nogitsune took away from him would forever be a dark spot in his mind, as twisted as the lightning shaped scars spider-webbing over his right shoulder blade. 

Even now, as he’s actually learned how to use his… gifts, he hasn’t said a word.  Deaton knows, the man must have put it together with all the questions Stiles had brought up.  Stiles wouldn’t put it past Morrell to have figured it out.  But both of them already understand.  The magic isn’t different between them, just the history.  A history only people with the magic would know. 

Stiles reaches into his bag and takes out his copy of the bestiary, riddled with his own added notes since he and Lydia translated and printed them Junior year.  He packs it in his trunk next to his own journal of new entries of the supernatural, his mother’s candles and tarot deck, and his own collection of wolfsbane and mountain ash.  Stiles opted out of college to travel abroad for a year.  He needed to get away, he told his dad, to see the world and learn who he was again.  He would have a mental break two weeks into college if he went as he was now.  They both knew it. 

Stiles was going to visit his grandmother in Poland.  Tour Europe.  Maybe learn more than he wants to about the world, but definitely as much as he needs to.

X

A week into living with his grandmother she makes him a cup of cider and tells him the same bedtime story his mother passed down. 

“My husband was a great man,” she said in Polish, slowly so Stiles could catch the words.  “Odd man, but great.”

Claudia was their eldest, so she was the one tasked with passing on the family name, a relic that twisted on the tongue.  Had she never had Stiles, her younger brother would have adopted the honor, perhaps going so far as to renamed Stiles’s eldest cousin after the time of his Claudia’s passing.  It never came to that, however.  Stiles was here.

Sometimes Stiles felt guilty for shaking off his given name.  He went by Stiles, a shortening of his last name.  Even his middle name had been taken from his father’s family.  The only thing left of his mother was a secret.  Perhaps it was best that way, he mused.  There was a power in names. 

X

After the nogitsune, after _Allison_ , that was when Stiles first started planning his trip across Europe.  He wasn’t sure if or when he would take it, just something to steady his mind when faced with memories of a twisted darkness.  That year, though, was the hardest he had ever gone through, somehow still managing to come out alive.  By the time college applications came around, Stiles hadn’t been able to do anything but look at his list of schools and think _what’s the point?_  

Derek was gone by this point.  Stiles was sneaking into the loft that wasn’t yet being remodeled.  The pack mostly met at Scott’s house now and sometimes Stiles just needed time to be alone, to think, to remember what it used to be like, the tingling under his skin something new and exciting, the taste of a memory rich and savory rather than chalk on his tongue. 

Sometimes, if it was late, Stiles would catch his reflection in the broken windows.  His face refracted back to him in jagged multiples.  “Are you okay?” he would ask himself silently.  There was no answer. 

X

A long time ago there was a seventh son of a seventh son who wandered into the woods and met Baba Jaga.  She taught him how to talk to the trees and listen to the wind.  He became the hermit townsfolk sought for help and healing, love and passing.      

X

Stiles had always loved the woods.  Growing up he spent a lot of time hiking the trails, the barely beaten paths.  His mother helped steer him – away from the wolves and their root cellar, he knew now – and together they made the trees a second home. 

Stiles had always had a hard time staying away.  Had half of a woman’s body shown up in the middle of the warehouse district, Stiles wonders if he would have begged Scott to come along.  Knowing the things that go bump in the night, Stiles still found himself, time and time again, wandering the woods.  The only place he favored over it in Beacon Hills to seek solitude was Derek’s loft, after Derek had gone.  Stiles was a glutton for torture, it seemed.  He keep reaching out, trying to find that frayed edge of a tether.

It was never there.

X

Scott was there to welcome him home at the SFO International baggage claim.  He was decked out in a soft green hoodie sporting _Sacramento State_.  Lydia was at MIT.  Kira at NYU, her parents moving back there and she got free tuition with her dad a professor.  Malia had to repeat a year of high school, but she had just gotten accepted into the local community college.  The rest of the pack was still in high school.  Or dead.   

Returning to Beacon Hills felt strange.  He was much more attuned to things now, the random associations his brain made now had a solid reasoning behind them.  The land was slowly giving up trying to sink its roots into the Hale bloodline, like it had for generations.  Two years without Derek and Beacon Hills was finally accepting that the McCall pack was the new epicenter to protect rather than chase away.  It was like trying to fix an autoimmune disease, Stiles thought.  The body wasn’t attacking itself anymore.

Stiles found he wasn’t searching out the tether to Derek anymore because neither was the town.

Stiles found he still missed him, though. 

X

Derek answered the phone with a groggy “Hello,” clearly having just woken up.

“Derek?” Stiles asked, still not positive he got the number correct.

“Stiles?” Derek asked, sounding a lot more alert than just moments before.  “What’s wrong?  Are you okay?”

“Are you?” Stiles responded, not really thinking about the words.  It just felt natural, now, after all the time he spent thinking about that moment. 

There was a long pause on the other line.  “Yeah, actually.  I am.”

Stiles smiled, something slow and cautious.  “Me too, I think.”

X

“You seem a lot more… present, now.  More solid.  Stiller,” Derek offered, somewhat awkwardly, as he showed Stiles around the property.  Derek was living in a large lake house in the middle of Montana, surrounded by woods for miles of his own property, before it butted up against someone else’s expanse of land and lake and giant house, only partitioned by a string and hanging signs. 

Stiles shrugged.  “I feel balanced.  Like, there was always something missing or something I never tapped into, and when I did, everything was in chaos, so it couldn’t settle.”

“What changed?”

“Three months studying magic with my cousins in Poland before backpacking the rest of Europe.”

Derek made a noncommittal sound, but there was a look on his face that Stiles read as being proud. 

“You seem lighter,” Stiles commented.  “This had been good for you.”  He gestured around the backyard between the house and the lake. 

“Cora comes and visits on holidays,” Derek said, sipping his coffee.  The air was brisk, it was late fall and Stiles was envious of the warm beverage.  He’d ask for his own soon enough.

Stiles shook his head.  “You know how my name is crazy Polish?”  Derek nodded, unperturbed the by the sudden topic shift.  “It’s actually one hundred percent made up for my family.  There’s supposed to be one a generation, going to the eldest’s eldest son.  So, my grandfather was the first born male of his generation, but he had an older sister.  So his older sister gave her first son the family name, but her first son was actually the fourth of that generation, my mother being the first born.  So that means, my mom’s first son, me, got the godforsaken name.”

“Okay?”

Stiles sighed.  “My cousin Wawrzyniec had a baby boy when I was over there.  I don’t have to worry about the name anymore.  Or the lineage.  I doubt I’ll have any kids.  Or, at least any biologically my own.”

“Why do you think that?’

Stiles side-eyed Derek, smirking a bit.  He shook his head and looked back out over the lake. 

X

“How long are you staying in town?” Derek asked. 

Stiles shrugged, running his hands over the bark.  The woods were calm here.  Content and sturdy.  Beacon Hills didn’t feel like home anymore.  He didn’t want to go off to study.  He’d done his studying, he knew who he was now.  He was the hermit.  He was of the woods, just as much as Derek was.  These could be his woods, too.  He looked over his shoulder at Derek.  Maybe.

A twig snapped in the distance and Derek stilled, eyes wide but not scared.  Stiles breathed in the air, his hand still on the bark of the tree.  There was a crunch of leaves.  A stag stepped between the trees, antlers so large he must be an old man. 

“They never get this close to me,” Derek whispered.

“He’s not here for you,” Stiles said. 

Not quickly, but not cautiously slow either, Stiles stepped up to the buck.  He put his hand out, and in an instant, the buck pressed his muzzle against Stiles’s palm.  Stiles pet it for a moment before the deer decided to pull and away and bound off.

When Stiles turned around, Derek was staring in awed surprise. 

Stiles shrugged again.  “A long, long time ago a witch taught my family how to become one with the woods.”

Stiles kept Derek’s eye.  The Predator and the Prey.  But it was never really like that for them, was it?  They were just both searching for a bit of woods that spoke to them as Beacon Hills once did, with open arms and whispered laughter.

X

Stiles sat on the back porch, dripping from his morning dip.  The hot summer sun was already warming him back up from the chilly morning lake water.  Derek slid the glass door open and leaned against the open frame, looking down at him. 

“How do you pronounce your name again?” Derek asked.

“Why?” Stiles scrunched his nose.  Derek kept trying to understand Stiles’s history.  He thought it was important.  The texts Derek was collecting in the library sat neatly next to Stiles’s three volume, self-created bestiary and the surviving books from the Hale vaults.  Stiles had his own stack of shelves just for pure fiction and comic books. 

“Because I would like to be able to say your real name.”

“Why?” Stiles pressed, more toying than anything else.

“Because,” Derek said, hunching down to get on Stiles’s level, “I like having things about you all to myself.”

Stiles smirked. 

“Be-yow-euh-yell-en-nee,” Stiles said, slowly over enunciating each syllable. 

Derek cupped the back of Stiles’s head, tangling his fingers in the wet hair, and kissed Stiles on the mouth. 

“Your family is so pretentious,” Derek smirked. 

“Hey!” Stiles swatted with a laugh, “we were considered _gods_ for the better half of three centuries.  I’m not surprised they clung to that lineage.” 

“Białyjeleń,” Derek said, his pronunciation not perfect, but getting there. 

Stiles groaned.  “Don’t you dare call me that in public.  Or in bed.  I mean it,” he snapped.

Derek laughed and lifted Stiles off the ground and swung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  “Come on, Bambi, back in the lake.”

Stiles squawked and squirmed, insisting it was too cold to go back in until noon.  Derek merely jumped off the dock with his arm still around Stiles’s waist. 

**Author's Note:**

> Stiles's name is the words "White Stag" in Polish.
> 
> Thanks for reading.
> 
> [FIND ME ON TUMBLR](http://www.inthearmsofathief.tumblr.com)
> 
> Also! I'm made a webseries about werewolves! [The Werewolf Diaries](http://www.youtube.com/c/amyberserk)


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